Hulu in Canada.

Unbelievable. I tuned in to Hulu.com, the nicely designed site featuring popular video clips, thanks to a link by John Gruber today. Lo and behold, I live behind some kind of iron curtain in Canada. Hulu.com is not available in my “country or region,” which essentially means “we don’t like your kind,” or, more technically, “our copyright laws do not apply to you.” What looks to be a promising means of corporate release of digital rights turns out to be, for now, a tease and poor one at that.

Intermission.

I promise that the following video will entertain while I get my s* together.

(A) Good Magazine.

Amazingly, there are a number of new magazines getting out there these days. It's an incredibly crowded place, but one magazine that looks very promising (and is getting blog traction) is Good. I love the logo, their site is pretty (albeit with pretty small type), and they're doing some really interesting typographic and visual work.*

You subscribe to the magazine and 100% of the proceeds go to the charity of your choice (or your choice from their website, actually). (Unfortunately, Canadian subscribers have to add $10.00. Why do people in Canada always to have to pay more for everything? It's not like we live in Japan or something.) The press release from their design agency's launch says "Amazing, but true – visit their website and see for yourself how they are redefining the magazine business model." I don't know if there actually is a business model but it's cool nonetheless.

*As an example, take a look at this video, produced by Good. It's both cool and scary, a kind of private-public service advertisement with good historical footage, smart music, and good art direction.

Bob's Your Uncle.

I heard the phrase "Bob's Your Uncle" today on Mary Poppins. My wife has said it for years, mostly related to cooking (e.g. "You put the water in the pot, add some miso, and 'Bob's your uncle.'") and to the ease and quality of the results.

Well, I wanted to find out the history of the phrase and it's, of course, an interesting one:

The most attractive theory, albeit suspiciously neat, is that it derives from a prolonged act of political nepotism. The Victorian prime minister, Lord Salisbury (family name Robert Cecil, pronounced ) appointed his rather less than popular nephew Arthur Balfour to a succession of posts. The most controversial, in 1887, was chief secretary of Ireland, a post for which Balfour, despite his intellectual gifts, was considered unsuitable. The Dictionary of National Biography says: "The country saw with something like stupefaction the appointment of the young dilettante to what was at the moment perhaps the most important, certainly the most anxious office in the administration". As the story goes, the consensus among the irreverent in Britain was that to have Bob as your uncle was a guarantee of success, hence the expression. Since the very word nepotism derives from the Italian word for nephew (from the practice of Italian popes giving preferment to nephews, a euphemism for their bastard sons), the association here seems more than apt.

Fo Shizzle, MANOVERBOARD.

Here's my motherfuckin' company's website, MANOVERBOARD, transliterated into the shiznit via Gizoogle. I couldn'ta said it better:

MANOVERBOARD: Web N Print Design N Dippin'.

MANOVERBOARD
• develops accessible, elegant n powerful websites tizzle bring thugz togetha
• builds corporate identities n printed materials tizzy bring thugz bizzle
• provides website analysis n Web design steppin' that bring thugz results

Karments.

I've often thought that micropayments to bloggers would be a very helpful, and perhaps even lucrative, method to keep blogs afloat. I'm fascinated by a new payment system called IndieKarma that I learned about through Jason.

In a nutshell, IndieKarma allows website visitors to donate tiny amounts of money (well, one American cent) to a blog that accepts IndieKarma funds every time that visitor visits. It's kind of a nice, simple, and elegant system in theory; you pay for content that you like, read and want to continue reading. Jason does the math:

Financially, if a reader visits a site 60 times a month (which is not that unusual for weblogs), that's $0.60/mo. or $7.20/yr...the price of a couple lattes at Starbucks. If you've got 1000 people who read your site that are signed up through IndieKarma, that's $7200 per year, a sizable chunk of change.

I'm tempted to try it or at least learn more about it. But there's something about it that reminds me of the old, wild, West Web and the e-money that many companies tried to sell us poor suckers. Remember Whoopie Goldberg and Flooz? (In February of 2000, $27 million was invested in the company in second-round funding. How about Flooz's competitor, the lovely Beenz? Boy, did they screw up.

I don't mean, in any way, to put bad Karma on IndieKarma. The idea is sound, if not quite brilliant, and, if IndieKarma can gain enough subscribers and bloggers, many folks will benefit.

br = break

I read the recent post by Veen about the pathetic impossibility of visiting the new Banana Republic website on Apple's Safari browser. Amazingly, some company got paid much money to make a broken website for a large multi-national. I wanted to comment on Veen's post but he had, alas, turned comments off. Here was mine, for the (or my) record:

This all brings up something I've been thinking about for a while. Back in the baby days of the Web, some good soul kept track of which sites were designed by which companies, agencies, or individuals. It was a way to check in on the competition, look for good work and possibly good employers, and generally get a sense of what was being done (and how) on the Web. It would be great to know what boneheaded firm was paid good money to create a website that not only excludes paying visitors but makes claims to standards compliance and lies. This isn't really a request for "outing" as it is to keep the Web development business open and transparent as possible.

Young Thing

It's a few days very late but Amazon.com is 10 years old. That makes me feel about 40, which so happens to be almost how old I am.

The Web truly is a young thing. It lives everywhere and is reckless and dangerous and thrives among the best (e.g. Wikipedia) and worst (Total Information Awareness, e.g.) of us. The Web shows that it's possible for any schmuck to design or write for ebooks and that commerce is possible among breathing people without exchanging breaths. The Web is both old and new, shaped by our perceptions of quickly passing time and even more quickly fleeing electrons, prepared to submit to our little whims, whether fetishistic, opportunistic, receptive, or attavistic.

In any case, I uncynically applaud Amazon.com for taking the pounding of millions of keystrokes and landing in the spotlight for its success, longevity, and profitability.

Webbed Sadness

I found out today through Airbag that Design-in-Flight has shut its doors. This is truly a sad day for the Web, for Web designers, Web developers, and online folks everywhere. For a small fee, Andy Arikawa produced a beautiful PDF magazine that focused on Web standards, productivity, design tricks and tools and it was illustrated lusciously and elegantly. It was the first (and I guess only) PDF magazine that I had (very) hopes for. I still haven't found the answer to the qustion "Why?" yet but when I do, I'll try to post it.

I know what it's like to start a publication and end it. The work that goes into producing a regular periodical is voluminous and never-ending. I edited a small zine called Soup Magazine back in the early 1990s when the desktop publishing revolution was alive. We took ads and I eventually had a small staff of friends to help produce the thing. It eventually sold in Tower Records throughout the U.S. and Europe and got picked up by Printed Matter as well as many other small print distributors. After leaving for a year to live in Poland, the zine couldn't get rescusitated and it failed. [It's hard to believe but Printed Matter still has some of these issues available!

I also found through Hicks that Joshua Ink is no longer writing. I don't know his work well but there seems to be a big community of folks that are missing him.

These things always come in threes, right? I'm going to take it as a good sign that there's no apparent three there.

[Note: The last DIF issue can be downloaded now (July 15, 2005). I have a small piece in it.]

Odd Links

Every once in a while, it's good for me to purge some pent-up links that I've been keeping too close. [I know these last posts have been short, but so am I.]

• A new site called Tortured by Tyson by our friends at PETA. Warning: Very graphic imagery. Happy dinner!
• A kind of funny website that recreates the Windows desktop and is built entirely with XHTML/CSS. It makes me happy that this is not what I look at every day on my desktop.
• Happy Healthy Summer for kids and those who like kids.
• Amazon's Google, A9 Beta. The beta is better because it's cleaner. But I emailed them that they should change the light purple background color of the site because it's acts like a soporofic.

The Project

Dear Readers:

My apologies for not writing to you earlier. I've been swamped trying to put the finishing touches on my latest project -- a new stock photography website I've been developing with a few others over the past 8 months. We're very close to launching, perhaps even a few days away.

The temporary site of The Art Bureau has been up for a while and you can sign up for launch information there, if you like.

I'll be writing about websites, Larry Clark, Schiller's Liquor Bar, and La Caverna shortly.

Thank you for your time, patience, and indulgence.

Sincerely,

Andrew.

Everything Is New

I’m writing a post about the politics and social construction of websites. It’s taking a little while.

In the meantime, I thought I would mention a few sites that continue to astound me because of their intuitive design, organic information architecture, innovative interfaces, and unique use of typefaces. Many of these are using advanced CSS to push the boundaries of the experience. And these aren’t even in Flash, which I’m finding increasingly unnecessary for 98% of website projects at this point.

Enjoy…small to large:

• One of the most beautiful type treatments on an HTML site I’ve ever seen.
• A competitor but oh, what a good one.
• Okay, another competitor.
• Google’s Gmail: the interface is so insanely bright throughout.
• Amazon’s highly entertaining and customizable search engine. Check out its “Discover” section which recommends sites based on your interest

Dead Websites

A dead website is the great unspoken on the Web and among Web audiences. Registerting domain names, getting hosting, designing a site, building a site, developing a site, redirecting a site, scaling a site, integrating a site, redesigning a site: these are all fun, pretty, happy terms. But the truth of the matter is that websites are very temporary objects on the fluid Web and have half-lives just like every combustible thing.

They are born, they grow, they are loved by a few, they communicate a few things, and then they go on to die. The death of a website generally goes unmarked, unnoticed, and unrecognized. A dead website is no longer a valuable enterprise but a historical record, a fiercely marked arena of time. A website that has died gets no funeral, no sendoff, no eulogy, and often gets no final words. Websites seem to die a strange death - they are both very public and very private organisms, created by a living few for a living audience and when they pass, the act of viewing them or reflecting on them is inherently solitary. I've yet to see a blog about dead sites, but I'm sure there could be one.

No, this is not farewell.

But I've noticed quite a few (quite good) blogs that I once read, which are no longer alive, including Dean Allen's Textism, Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Mark, and Charles Hartmans' eponymous weblog.

I suppose there's at least one other interesting thing about website death, though, that differs from that of humans: they can be resurrected.

Non-Literary Literacy

It was a weekend spent mostly inside, except for tonight when we ventured into the cold yonder to have dinner at a friends home about 18 blocks away. Boy, was it cold but it felt fine.

Being indoors and having time to explore new sites led me to the new PBS Kids Go! site which features a large section called Advertising Tricks. It's pure media training for young kids, with interactive features like "Create Your Own Ads" and "Design a Cereal Box." It's impressive that, with the government now funding public relations for its political programming, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is funded by taxpayers, has seeded this smart educational enterprise. I hope it lasts and I say that not cynically but with real hope that the site has both legs and feet. Hey kids, the perfect burger for the camera lens is made with brown food coloring, Superglue, and glycerin!

The Flood Online

There are a tremendous number of online resources out there meeting the call to help people in Southeast Asia and Eastern Africa. One of the better, and least denominational, is Network for Good. [Addition: This CNN page is also excellent]

From everything I've (sadly) heard over the past few days, nothing will help people more than plain old cash money. The organizations involved there simply need funds to keep supplies and food moving. I am donating to American Jewish World Service but it matters not.

Giving online, unlike sending a check or volunteering, still feels strange to me. The disconnect between the button clicked and the recipient helped is all too wide. But from the reports, it may be that donating on the Web may be the fastest route to those overwhelmed by tragedy.

New My Yahoo!

Yahoo! is slowly transforming it's old Times New Roman image to a more sophisticated search engine that actually looks like it's 2004.

Most relevantly to me, the company is now beta-testing refurbished My Yahoo!. My Yahoo! is an old friend of sorts; it's been my homepage for about 7 years, which means that I probably see this page about 7 times more than any other page on any site. On this page, I get news, weather, stocks, box office info, horoscopes, and now RSS feeds from blogs I like. But this new version of the confabulator is a bit like watching an old friend don new pajamas where the fit is a bit tight in the shoulders and too loose in the waist -- and yet, the pajamas look kind of nice overall. The stripes work and the colors are gentle and calming but the overall package feels like it's going to be uncomfortable to sleep in, particularly in the groin area.

Browse Happy

Brought to you by the folks who began, run, and promote the Web Standards movement, it's cool to see a site finally dedicated to looking at safer, better browsers.

Included on the site are testimonials of people who switched off of Internet Explorer for a variety of means and now use either Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, or Safari. It's about time that the Web standards movement is pushing the positive benefits of standards, which include better and safer browsing as this site clearly advocates. I'm hoping that this site will start to bring real, readable, and realizble Web standards to the people.

Automat

I have a special folder in my email client called "Automat." This catch-all sub-folder, within the inbox, contains the whole gamut of digests, permission-based emails, forums, and account updates I receive.

I barely read any of them.

Instead of getting all sad about it, I thought I'd post all the good things I'm missing, thus allaying my alternating fears and feats of waste and knowledge saturation. They are:

• Apple's weekly in-store and online promotions
• TidBITS' newsletter
• WebDesign-L's daily email digest
• Evolt.org's and css-discuss.org's digest
• Webproducers' email posts
• iPrint.com's weekly sales promotion blowout
• Typephile.com's Forums emails
• Email promotions for both PhotoWorks and Ofoto
• Other promotions from ITCFonts.com, Dotster, Adobe, AMEX, L.L. Bean, iPrint, and my favorite, PayPal

Swords into Shares

Found on the Tiffany & Co. | Frequently Asked Questions section. I wonder if this is a little like asking Krups if they manufactured that World War I machine gun I have sitting in my basement. (Note large historical ellision between 1846 and 1950).

Bush in 30

Just when I thought that MoveOn.org was moving on and video advertising was becoming increasingly a parody of itself, take a look at these relatively well-crafted political videos at Bush in 30 Seconds. The first, third and fourth ones are the best.

Happiness

It's the middle of Chanukkah, almost Christmas, and a few days to the New Year. What else to do but celebrate with some links:

The "new" new Zeldman, which I think is kind of disjointed, disfigured even. I don't know why the tabs exist on the page, why a robotic asian woman is featured on the right side of the page, and I don't know why there are about 8 different typefaces and type treatments throughout the site.

A blog that I've found to be good reading on Canadian real and Web life, which features poor design but great content.

Method's web site, while no longer cool in its non-graphical graphical interface and stripped-down text-based logic, is still in black and white. When Method first did this a few years ago, I was taken aback. Now, it just seems funny and maybe interesting.

A list of RSS readers, which I may or may not have posted before.

My friend Victoria's new company called Sweet Yaya that sells luscious-looking sweet things.

Saddam's Capture

I'm not sure of the total veracity of this Sunday Mail report on Mossad's total involvment in capturing Mr. Hussein but the questions asked about Saddam's capture one week ago are profound. These are things I've been asking myself, small twitches of wonder going off in the back of my head, but I'm glad that here they are in one, detailed list:

• WHO were the two unidentified men armed with AK-47 rifles who stood guard over the hole? Were they there to protect Saddam or kill him if he tried to escape?

• WHY did Saddam not use his pistol to commit suicide—and become the martyr he had long boasted he would be?

• WAS it cowardice that stopped him—or was he expecting to make a deal? To not only reveal the truth about weapons of mass destruction, but also about his deal with Russia and China, whose secret support had encouraged him to continue to confront the US.

• THE hole he hid in had only one opening. It was blocked. He could not have escaped. So was it in effect a prison? Was he being held there as part of a trade-off?

• WHAT was the $US750,000 (about $A1 million) found on him for?

• WHY did he have no communications equipment? Not even a mobile phone was on him.

FirstGov

FirstGov.gov was re-launched recently and I have much interest in it.

First, it seems to attempt to take the place of the for-profit portal featured in that all-too famous documentary a few years ago. Second, the re-design itself is boring, insulting, even tortuous -- it looks like it was designed by eight different government committees sitting behind locked doors who could only communicate via keyholes. I wonder, even, if there was a designer in-house to build this monster.

Third, the site, as a friend noted, is not 508 compliant so it doesn't adhere to the accessibility standards that the U.S. Government has set for itself. And lastly, sites like NYC.gov, which I had the pleasure of loosely working on a few years ago, have become models for online government communications.

Postscript: I do think the FirstGov portal is a good idea. I just wish the site looked and acted smarter.

Oh and this

I got quoted on Zeldman, page down to see my little reflection.

Candy Store

I'm so happy not to have to be beholden to my own prison of writing only about blogging that I can't help but note a few great things I've found. It's all excitement and a rush of freedom, which must feel a bit like how the colonists must have felt right after they kicked the British our of the 13 states. Here's a smidgen:

Here's a fascinating little chart (page down once there) about the number of folks who are upgrading to Panther, the new OS from Apple: Daring Fireball: Graphic Communication

Over the weekend, I found the most powerful book yet on the life of Anne Frank, called Anne Frank: Beyond the Diary. The small paperback details the very modern life of her family with superb photos, diagrams of their living quarters, and reproductions of signs and signage seen throughout Amsterdam at the time. It provides a fascinating chronology of her childhood in context and is just a very good and unlikely read.

Lastly, I'm happy to be using Rancher software's NetNewsWire for RSS feeds. In a nutshell, it allows you to easily see the most recent stories posted on websites and weblogs without having to type in "http://www.blahblahtripleblah.net" every time you're interested. A very nice, very simple application with mojo.

Outsourcing

I receive emails nearly every day from India, Romania, Russia, and Poland mostly, for Web development services, but today I received one from India, which offered me a price of $6.00 per hour for the following:

PlatForms : Windows, Linux, Unix, SunSolaris
Languages/Scripting : JavaScript, VBScript, PHP, ASP, VB, C++, Cold Fusion etc.
Database : MSSQL, MySQL, Oracle, MSAccess etc.
Graphics: PhotoShop, Flash (Database Driven Application) Gif Animation etc.

In the old days of Web development, I worked with 21 year olds who were paid six digits for the same skills (and they did excellent work).

Fresh

I'm anxiously (or is it eagerly) awaiting the first delivery of our odd FreshDirect order. I find the whole thing of shopping for produce and other food online both clearly disruptive and sadly seductive. Here are my questions to myself, as I wait the free, tip-less delivery:

- What does it mean that I'd rather tap out this missive rather than squeeze the grapefruit, smell the fresh cinnamon, or sample the cheese?

- Why don't any of the supermarkets around here allow you to squeeze the grapefruit, stock fresh cinnamon, or sample cheeese?

- Is this one more abstraction away from the real and toward a denial of time-based, space-based pleasure? Is shopping online fulfilling or demeaning the pleasure of shopping generally?

- How is pleasure delineated on the FreshDirect website? Have they found a way to substitute the look and feel of food for the "look and feel" of a website?

- Will my actual diet be better off with FreshDirect and will the extra food we undoubtedly ordered go to waste?

A Sight

Holy cow. This is a website that I really, really, really love.

A Lot

This site is barely reachable right now because so many are clicking, but take a look at britishpathe.com between the hours of 10 pm and 7 am. It's a collection of 12 million images that have been produced from every second of film from 3,500 hours of 35 mm movies. In brief: it's a phenomenal phenomenon of phenomena.

Google Wack

I was interested in reading Kottke's recent piece on Google and AdSense, which lays out the stupidity of marketers in relation to their tech-savvy clients. For a long time, I've thought that Google was wolf in sheep's clothing, though I use it all the time for all my searches and have done so since it was born.

More recently, the NYT wrote an article in its business section about Google's placement of counters on select "customers" Google home pages so that they can keep track of how many or what searches take place on a more minute level. Why is the curse of dishonesty so strong for large companies?

Non-Flash Flash

This is a page of amazing optical illusions that I have never seen before. When I first clicked on it, I thought, oh, more Flash-based abstractions. But no, these are not Flash, they are still images that move because our eyes are perfectly imperfect. This site, making the rounds on many blogs right now, is a perfect antidote to the sadness and inanity around the September 11, 2001, commemorations.

A Stunning Site

I know this one has been making the blog rounds of late, but this is a truly beautiful Flash website of animated photographs of London's Streatham Cemetary taken by photographer Jonathan Clark. While images of cemetaries are generally ridiculously trite and can border on the hilarious, these lusciously and lovingly detailed miniature movies about death in life are admirably crafted and lend themselves to their subtly animated Flash container.